I just finished a draft of the following essay, entitled Operation Get Fired: A Chronicle of the Academic Repression of Radical Environmentalist and Animal Rights Advocate-Scholars, that explores how the US academy is currently involved in making things difficult for scholars with radical interests in contemporary ecopolitics. As it has to do with the thematics of my blog and is connected to Freire's work, I would like to offer it here in advance of publication. Below is the intro and a link to the full piece as .pdf. I'm open to any comments or critique, which if it arrives quickly enough may be able to be worked into the essay's published form.

Operation Get Fired: A Chronicle of the Academic Repression of Radical Environmentalist and Animal Rights Advocate-Scholars

Richard Kahn

To make reality opaque is not neutral. To make reality lucid, illuminated, is also not neutral. In order for us to do that, we have to occupy the space of the schools with liberating politics. Nevertheless we cannot deny something very obvious. Those who make reality opaque through the dominant ideology, through spreading, multiplying, reproducing the dominant ideology, are swimming with the current! Those who demystify the reproducing task are swimming against the current! Swimming against the current means risking and assuming risks. Also, it means expecting constantly to be punished. I always say those who swim against the current are first being punished by the current and cannot expect the gift of weekends on tropical beaches! – Paulo Freire in Shor & Freire (1987: 36-7)

The myth of contemporary institutions of higher education is that they are scholarly places firmly grounded in the ideal and practice of intellectual freedom. University presidents, it seems, are especially fond of this ivory tower tale and spend time every year promoting their institutional commitment to advancing tolerance for diverse and marginal perspectives under the aegis of a supposedly evolving collective discourse taking place across the disciplines. The imaginative charm of such language is that it functions to evoke college campuses as representative cities upon a hill, places that are capable of modeling for civil society (and other levels of schooling) how enlightened communities should be established and function in their affairs. This romance of higher education tends to represent campus culture as a meritocratic and fertile support for individual excellence and ambition, even as the university is concurrently consecrated to the unbiased uplift of all it serves. The myth of academic freedom, then, is purposively connotative of the spirit of inclusion, of frank and democratic debate, and of administrative transparency and fairness – in short, of the open society (Popper, 1971).

To be sure, higher education does allow for a level of debate and ideological inclusion that is certainly welcome, and depending upon where one lives, it may in fact serve as a veritable sanctuary for faculty, students and citizens who are interested in pushing beyond expected social norms in their research agendas and lifestyles. Moreover, it is undeniable that the academy has historically been a friend, though not an exclusive or discerning friend, to the political and cultural left; and it continues to offer spaces of collegial support where progressives can organize politically, fraternize with countercultures, and receive a paycheck for engaging the minds and hearts of others in potentially meaningful work.

I myself am an academic and, truth be told, have spent almost the entirety of the last 20 years as either a teacher or a student within the hallowed halls of higher education. But, as Noam Chomsky must invariably remark at every lecture in which he savages the American State for its brutal atrocities and Big Lies, just as I am happy to identify as an academic (as well as an American) it does not mean that I do so as an apologist or with blinders on. In fact, the privileges that come with such status as I have been afforded by the academy and the nation perhaps make a form of ethical demand upon me as a scholar – that I undertake an ongoing critique of the limitations and contradictions of my place in society as a professional intellectual and that I attempt to reveal the manner in which the academic experience is neither a friendly nor emancipatory one. My particular work in the academy responds to this demand: I am a critical theorist of education working within the philosophical tradition known as critical pedagogy, which was founded by Paulo Freire and is broadly carried on today by important figures such as Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, Antonia Darder, Donaldo Macedo, Douglas Kellner, Joe Kincheloe, Bill Ayers and others.

As the epigram by Freire at the beginning of this essay makes clear, critical pedagogues view educational institutions as contested terrains that afford the possibility of resistance but which are necessarily related to and work on behalf of the larger society of which they are themselves a part. Thus, one of their dominant roles within the social structure is to serve as factories for the production-line formation of massified values and norms. This is done through the standardization of schooling’s hidden and avoided curricula as much as it is through that which is overtly taught and sanctioned as knowledge. In all of its primary curricular modes higher education, no less than elementary or secondary education (and possibly even more so), communicates intimately with the capitalist marketplace and the conservators of social power. Indeed, we are increasingly bearing witness to the rise of what Giroux (2007) terms a “military-industrial-academic complex” in which educational leaders commonly initiate strategic planning to forge deep alliances between their institutions of higher education with the corporate private sector, the Department of Defense and various armed forces services, as well as the security and regulatory apparatuses of the State. This has proven to be an ominous development for those who seek to define education as an avenue for moral progress in, as H. G. Wells once put, its race against catastrophe.

Those who are arguably now at the forefront of attempting turn back society’s trend toward the catastrophic are the activist-educators who are struggling for a new paradigm social movement of planetarity – a truly sustainable and ecological world comprised by a diverse range of earthlings, human and nonhuman species existing peacefully together beyond the domination of nature in evolving orders of mutuality. Who are these educators? They are the environmentalists who oppose the globalization of technocapitalism in its many guises. They are the vegan abolitionists. They are the earth and animal liberationists, who will take up direct action to put an end to violence, as well as all those who recognize that the pedagogy of the oppressed must now be conducted across species lines. They are the activists who recognize that the great emancipation of peoples must occur concurrently with the reconstruction of “personhood” as an ethical category, lest social justice be a progressive ruse that fails to meet the challenge of an unprecedented mass extinction crisis that is now underway. As such, these activist-educators swim headlong against the tide of the dominant ideology.

The corporate State has accordingly reacted with a campaign of terror, a Green Scare, designed to severely punish leading contributors of this counterhegemonic movement for social change, to generate paranoia and fear amongst its potential sympathizers, and to provide a causus belli for a new series of highly repressive laws and amendments designed to limit the free speech and the practice of civil liberties of the movement’s adherents. A centerpiece of this State response has been Operation Backfire, an FBI-led, multi-agency criminal investigation and COINTELPRO-style infiltration of the revolutionary environmentalist and animal rights advocacy communities. To common knowledge, this political operation in the hunt for so-called “ecoterrorists” has taken place in society at large. Yet, the academy as an institution of social reproduction has necessarily followed suit and become involved in this attack on radical environmentalists and animal rightists as well.

This essay, then, will attempt to briefly chronicle the wide range of academic repression that has resultantly taken place against scholars, students, and university groups who have dared to swim upstream against social and institutional hegemony by identifying their work and interests with the need to fight and care for the Earth and all of its inhabitants. By doing so, I believe readers will ultimately conclude that when those within higher education move beyond the campus proper to challenge the forces behind the Green Scare, the repressive aims of the State are likely to be brought to bear upon their academic freedom. The academy has itself maintained an attitude of what Herbert Marcuse (1969) termed “repressive tolerance” towards the green and animal rights radicals who work within its midst – creating an institutional cult that mouths the value of tolerance to preserve the status-quo and check attempts at opinion that work outside acceptable levels of controllable dissent. My underlying supposition is that this development is itself intolerable.

To continue reading the draft of this essay: http://richardkahn.org/writings/new/OperationGetFiredDraft.pdf